When one examines Connecticut state leaders’ efforts to ensure that everyone is counted in the 2020 Census, the phrase “progress, not perfection” comes to mind. “Progress,” because state officials recently announced that $500,000 in state funds would be transferred from five different state agencies to promote the Census. “Not perfection,” because that still isn’t enough money. CT Voices for Children, an advocacy group that is organizing around the 2020 Census, has called for $3.57 million in funding — $1 dollar for each of the 3.57 million residents in the state.
Archives: Voices
Better than building Trump’s border wall: Five ideas for investing in America’s families
What if we diverted $4.74 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation operations, and another $5 billion for President Trump’s proposed wall at the southern U.S. border, and used this money to invest in families instead? A new two-page research paper published by MomsRising and the National Priorities Project proposes doing just that, and offers up five examples of how this combined $9.74 billion could be invested.
Webinar: Service Providers and the 2020 Census — What You Need to Know. Register now.
Join CHN and our partners for a webinar at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 4 to learn what service providers need to know about the 2020 Census. Specifically we will share what’s at stake, what service providers need to be doing between now the Census, and where to get free/easy-to-use resources that can be used to achieve our goals. Hear from leaders of the national Count All Kids Campaign and the Census Counts Campaign as well as a local service provider about what works and what missteps to avoid.
Children Are Losing Access to an Extremely Effective Anti-Poverty Program: Medicaid
The number of uninsured children increased by more than 400,000 to more than four million nationwide between 2016 and 2018, reversing a long-standing positive trend and erasing many of the gains achieved after major provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect. Behind these numbers are millions of families struggling to make ends meet and get their kids the health care they need to succeed.
America’s foster care system: progress on many fronts, but still overburdened
An annual study of foster care in the United States reveals good news and bad news – and there are newly emerging threats, both at the state and federal level. The good news: for most of the 2010s, federal data showed the number of children in foster care steadily increasing after a previous decade of decline. The reason, in part, was the opioid crisis. Now, however, the number of children in foster care is declining, while the number of homes available to foster youth is on the rise.
The latest CHN Human Needs Report: Budget updates, Medicaid work requirements, low-income tax credits, and more
CHN just released another edition of the Human Needs Report. Read on for the latest on Congress’s work on spending bills, a judge’s ruling on immigration and health care, how Medicaid work requirements fared at the ballot box, efforts to expand low income tax credits, and more.
Rental Assistance Shortage Leaves 700,000 Veterans Homeless or Struggling to Afford Housing
As Veterans Day approaches, hundreds of thousands of veterans struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Some 38,000 veterans were homeless on a single night in January 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates. Moreover, 666,000 veterans lived in low-income households that paid more than half of their income for rent and utilities in 2017, Census data show. Low-income people with such high housing costs — what HUD calls “severe cost burdens” — often must skimp on items like food or clothing to pay for rent and utilities. They also face a growing risk of utility cutoffs, eviction, and homelessness as bills pile up.
When fighting poverty, listen to the impoverished
Last month the United Nations invited Ashana Bullet and Eduardo Simas to speak at a conference entitled “Perspectives on Poverty.” Bullet and Simsas are both members of ATD Fourth World, an international non-profit organization dedicated to finding and eradicating the root causes of poverty. Bullet is a lifelong resident of New Orleans; Simas owns and manages a farm in rural Brazil. Their message: when fighting poverty, listen to the impoverished.
Moving Backward: Efforts to Strike Down the Affordable Care Act Put Millions of Women and Girls at Risk
The fate of the Affordable Care Act is once again at stake, pending a decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the health care repeal lawsuit known as Texas v. United States. Texas and 17 other states—with support from the Trump administration—are challenging the ACA’s constitutionality. If the court rules to strike down the entire ACA, there will be devastating consequences for everyone; but these negative outcomes will be most pronounced for the millions of women with preexisting conditions and, in particular, for women of color and women with low incomes, whose health and economic security would be most at risk.
Homelessness in Caricature: How Empathy Can Help Us to Understand Homelessness as both the Result and Cause of Crisis
In America, when we think of homeless people, we think of a man in tattered clothes, maybe with a sign, standing on a street corner or slumped beside a building. We think of shopping carts and dirty faces, people who sleep under overpasses. The reality is, there isn’t one stock image of a homeless person, one template that they all follow. These caricatures allow the general American public to feel that homelessness is not their problem, or not a worry they might ever face.
Recent Comments